This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features more than fifty percent new content, with ten never-before-seen essays and one wholly revised and expanded piece as well as classics from the website like, “The God of Cake,” “Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving,” and her astonishing, “Adventures in Depression,” and “Depression Part Two,” which have been hailed as some of the most insightful meditations on the disease ever written.

Brosh’s debut marks the launch of a major new American humorist who will surely make even the biggest scrooge or snob laugh. We dare you not to.

FROM THE AUTHOR:This is a book I wrote. Because I wrote it, I had to figure out what to put on the back cover to explain what it is. I tried to write a long, third-person summary that would imply how great the book is and also sound vaguely authoritative—like maybe someone who isn’t me wrote it—but I soon discovered that I’m not sneaky enough to pull it off convincingly. So I decided to just make a list of things that are in the book:

PicturesWordsStories about things that happened to meStories about things that happened to other people because of meEight billion dollars*Stories about dogsThe secret to eternal happiness*

*These are lies. Perhaps I have underestimated my sneakiness!

Guest Review of “Hyperbole and a Half”

By Jenny Lawson

Jenny Lawson, is a very strange girl who has friends in spite of herself. She is perpetually one cat away from being a crazy cat lady. Lawson is the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller Let’s Pretend This Never Happened.

Allie Brosh is an internet legend and you’ve probably accidentally stolen stuff from her at some point in time, but she’s so awesome that she didn’t even sue you for it. Why? Mostly because she didn’t notice. Also, because she’s generous and she knew that you’d pay her back for using her hilarious images by buying the book she’d write one day. Today is that day. The good thing is that you will feel much better for having paid her back for accidentally facebooking something she wrote without crediting her AND you will get her fantastically perfect book which is filled with even more amazing stuff to steal. EVERYONE WINS.

When Allie first told me she was finished with her book I called her a liar, mostly because it would force her to send me a copy of the book for free. It was so good though that I would have paid for it, and that’s saying a lot because I shoplift most books, including my own. Frankly, when I read it I found myself repeatedly screaming “OH MY GOD, YES. THIS. FREAKING EXACTLY” until I eventually got kicked off the bus for disturbing the peace. I prefer to think I was disturbing the peace with truth. The people on the bus disagreed. Regardless, when Allie asked if I’d write a blurb for her I said “No, I will write you five.” And I did.

“BUY THIS BOOK. STOP READING THIS. MAKE THE BOOKSTORE PEOPLE TAKE YOUR MONEY. PS. You owe me a taco.”

“I laughed so hard that stomach juice shot out of the hole they just pulled my gallbladder out of. It might not be the best book to read right after surgery. Except that the pain pills make you forget that you hurt and also later you can read the book again when you’re sober and enjoy it all over again for the first time.”

“I wish I would have written this book. I plan on changing my name to Allie Brosh just to take credit for it.” ~ Allie Brosh (Formerly Jenny Lawson)

“This is the book you will give to your friends in order to make sure they are worthy of your love. If they don’t get it you should probably just set them on fire.”

“This book made me laugh, cry and leak. It was honest, poignant and ridiculously silly in all the best ways and I’m better for having read it. Plus, doggies!”

(TL;DR ~ Buy this book.)

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, November 2013: Who among us has not, in moments that sometimes bleed through years, even decades, felt weird, desperate, and absurd–wishing we could turn all the lamest, most shameful episodes in our lives into hilarious illustrated anecdotes? If youre one of the millions hanging on Allie Brosh’s every blog post, you already know you’ll love Hyperbole and a Half in book form, especially since half its hyperboles are new. If you’re suspicious of books because you live in a world of the INTERNET FOREVER, this is where you make an exception. If you just stumbled across Brosh and can’t yet grasp the allure of a Web comic illustrated by rudimentary MS Paint figures, believe the hype. Brosh has a genius for allowing us to channel her weird childhood and the fits and starts of her adulthood through the manic eyes, gaping mouths, and stick-like arms in the panels that masterfully advance her stories, and she delivers her relentless commentary with deadpan hilarity. Neurosis has rarely been so relatable and entertaining. —Mari Malcolm

Guest Review of Hyperbole and a Half

By Bill Gates

Bill Gates is a technologist, business leader, and philanthropist. He grew up in Seattle, Washington, with an amazing and supportive family who encouraged his interest in computers at an early age. He dropped out of college to start Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen. He married Melinda French in 1994 and they have three children. Today, Bill and Melinda Gates co-chair the charitable foundation bearing their names and are working together to give their wealth back to society. This review originally appeared on Bill’s personal blog the Gates Notes on May 19th, 2015.

Some of the books I’ve recommended as summer reads really aren’t. They’re long nonfiction books that might look a little out of place beside the pool or on the beach.

But Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things that Happened , by Allie Brosh, is an honest-to-goodness summer read. You will rip through it in three hours, tops. But you’ll wish it went on longer, because it’s funny and smart as hell. I must have interrupted Melinda a dozen times to read to her passages that made me laugh out loud.

The book consists of brief vignettes and comic (in both senses of the word) drawings about Brosh’s young life (she’s in her late 20s). It’s based on her wildly popular website.

Brosh has quietly earned a big following even though, as her official bio puts it, she “lives as a recluse in her bedroom in Bend, Oregon.” The adventures she recounts are mostly inside her head, where we hear and see the kind of inner thoughts most of us are too timid to let out in public. Despite her book’s title, Brosh’s stories feel incredibly—and sometimes brutally—real.

I don’t mean to suggest that giving an outlet to our often-despicable me is a novel form of humor, but she is really good at it. Her timing and tone are consistently spot on. And so is her artwork. I’m amazed at how expressive and effective her intentionally crude drawings are.

Some of Brosh’s stories are funny without being particularly meaningful, such as her tales about her two dogs and their humorously illogical inner thoughts. Here’s a typical snippet: “To the simple dog, throwing up was like some magical power that she never knew she possessed—the ability to create infinite food. I was less excited about the discovery because it turned my dog into a horrible, vomit-making perpetual-motion machine.”

And here’s a typical illustration:

But her best stuff is the deep stuff, especially the chapters about her battles with severe depression. There is a lot of self-revelation here but no self-pity. She brings the same wit to this subject as she does to her stories about her dogs—even if it makes the reader more likely to tear up than crack up.

Here’s a typical snippet that follows a riff about feeling suicidal and not quite knowing how to let loved ones know about these feelings:

I suspect that anyone who has experienced depression would get a lot out of reading this book. The mental illness she describes is profoundly isolating: “When you have to spend every social interaction consciously manipulating your face into shapes that are only approximately the right ones, alienating people is inevitable.” It must be empowering for those who have struggled with depression to read this book, see themselves, and know they’re far from alone.

It might be even more valuable for those who have a friend, colleague, or family member who has experienced depression. Hyperbole and a Half gave me a new appreciation for what a depressed person is feeling and not feeling, and what’s helpful and not helpful. Here’s a good example: “People want to help. So they try harder to make you feel hopeful…. You explain it again, hoping they’ll try a less hope-centric approach, but re-explaining your total inability to experience joy inevitably sounds kind of negative, like maybe you WANT to be depressed. So the positivity starts coming out in a spray—a giant, desperate happiness sprinkler pointed directly at your face.”

I get why Brosh has become so popular. While she self-deprecatingly depicts herself in words and art as an odd outsider, we can all relate to her struggles. Rather than laughing at her, you laugh with her. It is no hyperbole to say I love her approach—looking, listening, and describing with the observational skills of a scientist, the creativity of an artist, and the wit of a comedian.

FROM THE PUBLISHER:Every time Allie Brosh posts something new on her hugely popular blog Hyperbole and a Half the internet rejoices.

This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features more than fifty percent new content, with ten never-before-seen essays and one wholly revised and expanded piece as well as classics from the website like, “The God of Cake,” “Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving,” and her astonishing, “Adventures in Depression,” and “Depression Part Two,” which have been hailed as some of the most insightful meditations on the disease ever written.

Brosh’s debut marks the launch of a major new American humorist who will surely make even the biggest scrooge or snob laugh. We dare you not to.

FROM THE AUTHOR:This is a book I wrote. Because I wrote it, I had to figure out what to put on the back cover to explain what it is. I tried to write a long, third-person summary that would imply how great the book is and also sound vaguely authoritative—like maybe someone who isn’t me wrote it—but I soon discovered that I’m not sneaky enough to pull it off convincingly. So I decided to just make a list of things that are in the book:

PicturesWordsStories about things that happened to meStories about things that happened to other people because of meEight billion dollars*Stories about dogsThe secret to eternal happiness*